Deliver Us From Evil
by First Noelle
Summary: Who was it that wanted to send that big, brash message? What happens now that if failed?
1. Prologue

**_Disclaimer: I don't own any characters from "Red Eye". _**

**Deliver Us From Evil**

**By First Noelle**

**Prologue **

_Winter_

_The low watt bulb in the bedside lamp cast a false sense of daylight into a room that knew no real connection with the natural world. Its valiant attempt to banish the darkness was futile; clumps of shadow, like weeds, retreated, but did not cede the battle. The steady hum of a central heating system cycled on and off with a regularity that lent a sense of rhythm and order to this small world, and a reminder that what came would pass, and would come to pass again._

_The man's world was not defined by days and nights, or by meals and conversation, but by his body's rhythms, by the cycle of pain. The arc began its upward journey with a subtle tug, like a discreet 'ahem' from a junior manager seeking a subtle interruption of busy executive, and would distract him from the enthralling world of morphia. He would frown inside, shunning the interruption, but the tug, not to be ignored, would come again and again, finally forcing him to consciousness, to the reality of this small room with its false light and musty ventilation system. Once he awakened, when the pain had his full attention, it would graduate quickly from a mere nuisance to a full-out fury that must be mastered. Each time this happened, he knew he would master it, that he would climb on top of his pain without intervention; but each time he fell short, and was forced to wait in hell until respite, in the form of a gentle hand on his brow, would come. Then he would bite forcefully on his lips, stifling a groan, before parting them, desperate for the deliverance to be found in the pain pills. Always after this, his angel, as he thought of her, remained with him, stroking his forehead, easing the spiky, sweaty strands of his lank brown hair away from his face, back behind his ears, until, on the downside of the arc, the drugs began to spread peace through his battle-worn body. Then he would sleep again._

_Only once was this cycle disrupted. Instead of his angel, a man smelling of old barber shops sat beside his bed. He rested cool, calloused hands on the invalid's pajama-clad arm and spoke to him in measured tones. His words sliced neatly through the wall of pain. "I have your pills here in my hand," he said. "This won't be pleasant, but I'm afraid I must know what you told them." The patient smiled inside, reminded finally of who he was, and what he was capable of. After a long while, after a monstrous battle and a deep dark trip into a fiery red abyss of pain, he received absolution and was granted the solace of the pills. After the man left him, trailing afterburn whiffs of lavender in his wake, the patient allowed his lips to curve into a real smile._

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_**A/N: Short prologue, I know – I hope to get a full chapter up very soon**_

_**Although some of these characters are based on real people, situations and atrocities, please bear in mind that this is a work of fiction.**_


	2. Chapter 1

_Disclaimer: I don't own any Red Eye characters_

**Chapter 1**

Desert met sky in a flat line stretching past horse pastures, baling wire fences, and tract housing, past the western edge of Arizona, into Nevada, and north into Utah. Gentle, undulating mesas, banded in watercolor shades of gray and red, broke the skyline to the south and east, marking the outer edges of the astonishing and dazzling set of chasms and gorges that formed the Grand Canyon.

Two men walked side by side down a sagging fence line separating a pasture from a two-lane road rife with potholes. A putty colored Suburban, with paint peeling from its sides, sat beside a metal gate behind them.

Although spring was barely calendar legal, the mid-day sun in a cloudless sky cast a blinding glare on the flat desert floor. One of the walkers, the one leaning every now and then on a hickory cane, thought longingly of another life, one in which he went nowhere without a pair of Oakleys at the ready. And, he thought, scraping long strands of hair away from his face and under a Diamondbacks ball cap, he could really use a session with a good hairstylist. He had traveled a long, hard road over the past few months. A gunshot wound to the chest, of a type and intensity few recover from, had slammed him out of his fast paced, high-tech world into this semi-rural backwater where TV and radio were banned and the most exciting thing that happened all week was Sunday dinner.

Across the pasture, a bay mare, her colt, and a sorrel filly watched the two men with naked curiosity. The man with the cane, whose recent showdown with death had been faced with cast iron nerves, felt an unaccustomed nervousness. His brief history with horses (an unpleasant summer camp experience) did not incline him toward complacency and he cast a wary eye toward them.

"Rachel tells me you're healing pretty good, now. Faster than any of us thought you would." The speaker, a tall, Ichabod Crane of a man in his fifth decade, slowed his pace to accommodate the shorter stride of the other man. Dressed in beige gabardine pants, a white dress shirt, and an uninspired tie, he looked like a pest control technician. Pomaded, dust colored hair framed his bony, triangular face and his eyes were the color of storm clouds. "How is the pain?"

"It's manageable." The younger man watched the filly break into a spontaneous run, flashing across the pasture in a blaze of burnished copper. Her hooves beat a spirited rhythm on the hard packed ground as she looped the fence line at a full gallop. When she neared the walkers, she leaned into a smooth curve, and he jumped backward, just as her back foot shot up a chunk of desert dirt that clipped his shoulder. He brushed the dust from his denim shirt with meticulous care. "Rachel takes very good care of me, Ruel."

The older man smiled, revealing teeth that had seen no benefit from an orthodontist. "You have me at a disadvantage. I don't know your real name."

"For simplicity's sake, let's stick with Jackson."

"Jackson it is, then." Ruel squinted at the sky. "Rachel is a good woman. Those other two, I'm not so sure about. But that's neither here nor there; they're not my problem. Not yet, anyway. What I'm here to talk about is you; what we're going to do with you."

Jackson watched the filly; she had finished her circuit and now looked placid and content as she snagged a mouthful of hay from a steel hayrack. "I've been waiting for this. I was pretty sure you didn't pop out of hiding just to ask about my health."

"This isn't a bad thing." Ruel lifted his hands in a placating gesture. "Nothing for you to worry about. I didn't have you pulled you out of that Miami hospital, brought here and nursed back to life just to turn around and take it away again. We don't just teach forgiveness; we practice it, and I certainly understand that sometimes things don't quite work out like we plan them."

"Didn't quite work out. That's definitely one way to put it." Jackson gave a slight bark that could have been a laugh. No, he certainly hadn't planned on a green-eyed witch thwarting what should have been, for him, a simple operation. He swallowed hard, biting back a cold rage that rose up and threatened to choke him every time he thought about the red eye flight from Texas to Miami, and the violent battle afterward. He could not afford that anger. A lack of self-control was what led to the failure of that mission and he had learned his lesson well. It would never happen again.

"We're told the Lord makes beauty from ashes. I have received a divine revelation, and it is clear to me now that this happened the way it did for a reason."

"Did it, now?" Jackson murmured, entertained by a mental snapshot of Ruel Lee in earnest conversation with a burning bush.

"I know you don't hold with our beliefs – Jackson - but it would behoove you not to laugh at them." His voice was no less calm, no less even, but the threat behind the words was clear.

"You're right. I shouldn't mock." Jackson despised this man and everything he stood for; but it was bad business to let personal opinions show. "I'm sorry. I can't begin to tell you how grateful I am to all of you. You've taken excellent care of me, and you've saved me some serious money on hospital bills. You know, it's funny, but I don't even know what hospital they took me to, or how long I was there before you and your friends so kindly removed me."

"It was Cedars Medical Center. You were taken there by ambulance and they rushed you right into surgery. And you had been unconscious, or so we were told, since the surgery."

"Sounds like you aren't too sure about that." The mare strolled toward them, with a carefully studied air of nonchalance. The colt dawdled behind her, capering around on legs that looked like little twigs. Jackson, not trusting the mare, watched her with narrowed eyes until she and the colt passed them.

"I wasn't." Ruel stopped and looked straight at Jackson. "But I am now. You convinced me."

Jackson nodded coolly, flashing back to a trace memory of lavender. "How can I best pay you back for all you've done? You can draw me up a bill and I'll transfer the money wherever you say, unless you have something else in mind."

Ruel clasped his hands loosely behind his back and walked on. "Well, I don't often turn down cold hard cash, but you're right. I do have something else in mind."

"Somehow I thought you might."

"Well, here's the thing: I've established a settlement down in Texas, and I've had families down there for close to a year now. The neighbors aren't real friendly, but they haven't caused our people any serious trouble. I need you down there. You and I have a lot in common, but you have a broader base of contacts and resources than I do. That's why I hired you in the first place. You had the resources to get close to Charles Keefe and I didn't."

"Yes, well, it seems I seriously underestimated the creativity of one of those resources."

"Yes, the girl. She was quite the little action hero, wasn't she? If she was a man, I'd put some serious effort into bringing her into our fold, but women are not meant to act like that. Among our people, we have places for girls like that. We send 'em down to Texas for a little reeducation."

"Shit!" Jackson tossed his cane and grabbed his shoulder. "She bit me!"

He tore off his ball cap and threw it at the mare, who, having sneaked up from behind, now started to dance off out of reach. Ruel grabbed at her halter, and hooked his fingers under a nylon strap. She jerked her head, but he held her fast. Her eyes rolled and her mouth quivered, but Ruel crooned to her and soothed her, and gradually she calmed. Her tail stopped twitching and she lowered her head. After she exhaled a deep sigh, Ruel drew back his fist and delivered a brutal sock to her jaw. She screamed, rearing backwards and jerking free from his grip; then she wheeled, kicking up her back feet. She tore across the pasture at a dead run. The colt trotted after her.

"Sure, I'll go to Texas," Jackson said, twisting around to see if the mare had torn his shirt. "But I have a condition of my own."

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Harlan's grandfather, who came west in the mid-fifties to join like-minded worshipers in this western Arizona suburb, handcrafted the black walnut rocking chair that had soothed three generations of babies in Harlan's family, and would do so again in the late summer, after Rachel gave birth to their first child. At the moment, though, it soothed Jackson, who ran strong hands over the glossy wood, and closed his eyes, listening to the sounds from the kitchen, where Amy and Terry, Rachel's younger sisters, fought over who had to wash and who had to dry the dishes.

Amy as usual, had been a pain in the butt during dinner, edging her socked foot under the table to rub against Jackson's leg. Jackson, whose taste in women did not run to the pre-teen set, did a discreet eye-roll and ignored her. When the foot crept higher, and a small giggle came burbling out of Amy's mouth, he pictured her face, instead of the leathery, pan-fried steak, on his plate and sawed harder with his steak knife. He cut his eyes around the table to see if anyone else had noticed her behavior.

Terry hadn't; she stared at her plate, pushing a canned peach half around on a bed of lettuce. Rachel, however, was on top of it. Very little escaped Rachel's alert eyes. Her plain forehead was knit with just the tiniest bit of disapproval and as she pushed her thick-framed glasses back up her nose, she breathed Amy's name. Amy's foot stilled immediately. Luckily, neither Ruel, who had stayed for dinner, nor Harlan, who slapped out another spoon of rice onto his plate, seemed to notice.

Now dusk crept in and the last rays of sun, slanting in through the picture window, created shadow bars on the living room's gold shag rug. Ruel had left in the Suburban, to crawl back into whatever hidey hole he'd come out of; Harlan had gone out to feed the horses; and Rachel could now be heard gently moderating the dispute between her two sisters. Jackson rested his head against the back of the rocker, closed his eyes and sought patience.

The people who lived in this house had taken him in, had nursed him back to health, and had shared food with him he knew they could ill afford. He was grateful for this; without them, he might not be alive today. But despite their generosity to him, he wanted out of this world that was such a confusing mix of tyranny and love; flat-out abuse and doe-eyed acceptance.

He'd asked Rachel about this, once, this woman had tended to him when he couldn't even lift his head by himself, had bathed him, fed him, and soothed his brow. For a while, that care lent a strange intimacy to their conversations. He had asked her why she stayed, with this man, in this sterile house that lacked warmth or laughter; asked her how she could possibly be happy here.

"It's my home," she had answered. "These are my people; my family."

When he looked into that quiet, plain face, he saw peace there, and a simple, placid acceptance. He didn't understand it, and knew he never would. Then she startled him by asking, "How can you be happy in the life you have chosen? It's a cold, soulless life."

He hadn't known how to answer her. What did she know of his life? How could she begin to understand it? She'd gone on to say, "Don't you think I see the anger in you? Don't you know that kind of rage will destroy you?"

He had grown angry then, had narrowed cold eyes at her. "And the people in your community aren't violent?"

After that, he grew cold toward her; he shut her out. He focused solely on his physical recovery, and he felt his strength grow daily. In a couple of weeks he would be ready to leave, to tie up loose ends on the Keefe job. One whopper of a loose end would, in fact, soon cross over into his next job. He smiled, thinking of the irony, and picturing his hands twisting around russet hair. He could wait; he _would_ wait, as long as it took.

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_**Thank you royalty09 and emptyvoices for lots and lots of help!**_


	3. Chapter 2

_**Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters!**_

**Chapter 3**

The bar at the Sheraton, like most hotel bars, featured the standard lounge singer backed by a three piece combo, waiters in crisp black and white, soft, ambient lighting, and low-backed barstools of butter-soft leather. But despite the mellow ambience, Lisa Reisert felt edgy. She toyed with her glass, watched the sweat from the ice cubes drip down to saturate the cocktail napkin, and chewed on her straw. Then she tossed her straw aside, picked up her glass and quickly drained the contents. She closed her eyes and relished the burn as the gin slid down her throat. She honestly didn't like the taste of gin, but figured if you were serious about drinking, gin and tonic was about as honest as you could get. You couldn't pretend you were drinking it because it tasted good; you knew you were in it for the buzz.

As usual, she had set herself a strict two-drink limit, and this marked the end of the first one. She glanced around, looking for the bartender. Just as she caught his eye, the man sitting next to her spoke up and tried to buy her next drink. She refused and pulled a twenty from her purse and laid it beside her glass.

"Didn't mean to offend you." His voice was soft and matter-of-fact.

She glanced over at him, feeling somewhat more relaxed now, and saw a slightly built man in a rumpled charcoal suit. His hair was dark blonde and longish, cut in a style that made her think he was probably only a few years older than she. She couldn't see much of his face; he seemed to be staring into his glass with a kind of detached bemusement.

"I'm not offended," she said. "Not in the least." Then, slightly astonished at her own curiosity, she asked, "Are you staying here in the hotel?"

"No."

After a long moment, Lisa picked up her glass. "I guess it's my turn to apologize. I didn't mean to be intrusive."

"You weren't." His shoulders moved in a very slight shrug. "This is a hotel. It's a natural question. No, I'm a native. I come here… well, probably for the same reasons you do. I've seen you before, you know."

"I beg your pardon?" But she thought she knew. Six months ago, her face had been front-page news. TV cameras had followed her mercilessly, with journalists nipping at her heels trying to get a sound byte for the evening news from the woman who had foiled a terrorist plot to assassinate the director of Homeland Security and his family. A consistent refusal on her part, and on the part of others involved, to speak to the press had caused the publicity storm to subside fairly quickly.

Now she waited for this man to make the connection, for him to comment, and she braced herself to deflect him.

Instead, he said, "I've seen you at the health club. We belong to the same gym. I've seen you working out. You do a pretty intense workout."

Lisa looked at the man more closely. She watched him twist his glass, still half full of amber liquid. Scotch, she was almost sure. She noticed that his fingers were long and elegant. "Were you following me?"

He glanced up at her then, and smiled. He had, she thought, a very nice smile, set in a face defined by an angular but delicate bone structure. "No, of course not. The gym is just down this street. This is kind of a natural destination for those of us who aren't quite ready to go home after our workout. That's my story, anyway. What's yours?"

As much as possible, Lisa avoided paging through her own story, much less sharing it with others. She was, frankly, tired of it. She had changed jobs to get away from it, she'd done the therapy thing, and she'd written endless journal entries in an often-vain attempt to shut down the squirrel cage of thoughts that darted around in her head when she turned out the light at night. Above all, she made it a policy to steer clear of conversations like this. Now she surprised herself by saying, "You said we were here for similar reasons. What did you mean by that? And how could you possibly know why I'm here?"

"Just a guess. People who come to places like this and drink alone usually do it for pretty universal reasons."

She lifted her glass and took a long, slow drink. "And those reasons would be?"

"Ah, here is where we get to it." He focused his gaze on the long line of bottles behind the bar. "Here is where I risk a drink in my face, or at the very least, where you grab your purse and walk out."

"Please go on. You strike me as a brave sort."

"Okay," he said. "I'm guessing you're lonely. You're far too attractive to be lonely for lack of, well, 'prospects'. So that means either you're lonely within the confines of a relationship that may not be working out or because you're just not interested in anything permanent. Am I anywhere close?"

"Are you describing me? Or yourself?"

"Fair question." His laugh was soft. "Like I said, I think you and I have some similarities."

"And like me, you choose not to answer the question."

"The details aren't really important, are they? I don't even know your name. But I don't need to know it. Not yet anyway. What's important right now is that I feel drawn to you, and I think maybe you feel drawn to me, too."

Her breath caught in her throat and her heart started beating wildly. She felt a slow flush start at her scalp and spill down shoulders bared by her sleeveless blouse. She felt caught off guard, and stunned by her own visceral response to this man. She stared down at the dregs of her drink and stabbed the half melted cubes with a straw, and when the bartender appeared before her with a question on his face, she nodded, suddenly anxious to raise her drink quota to three. She realized as she did so that she had made a choice.

This was not Lisa Reisert's first excursion into a quiet bar after a mind-numbing day's work and a grueling workout at the gym. In the early evenings she could sit here, or in places like this, and let the cloak of shadows and candlelit illusions shield her while she drank her gin and watched the people around her, while she pretended she was part of life without having to participate in it. She needed the dark and the soothing lounge music and at some level she understood that she even needed the drinks as well, just to make it through the empty hours of the evening until bedtime. And bedtime was, more often than not, a battleground where she suited up to face the dark demons – the sleep slayers, as she thought of them - that came out after the lamp went out. And after that battle had been fought – sometimes won; sometimes not – she knew the sun would come up again and life would once more look safe. Dull and tedious maybe, but safe.

Tonight felt different to her; the edginess, the restlessness that even her second gin and tonic had not completely quelled was new. As was her decision not to make a casual excuse and slip discreetly away when the idle bar chat grew personal. Instead, acting on an impulse she neither understood nor argued with, she summoned a smile almost worthy of her former self and tilted her head toward the man sitting beside her.

"My name is Lisa." It was like going off the high dive for the first time, she thought. Terrifying, but strangely exhilarating. "And you have described me far too accurately."

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It ended badly, of course, as such beginnings often do. He wasn't to blame. Not fundamentally, anyway. It happened while they were still tiptoeing through the minefield of deciding just how much personal information to share. He mentioned his job as a business manager at a marketing agency. She would never know what he said after that because things suddenly clicked for her, and through an icy sheet of memory, she saw another man of similar build, of similar features, a man who initially held a similar fascination for her. _("Are you a shrink?" she'd asked him. " No. Manager.")_

The horror and the implications of what she had done swept over her with the tidal force of the Atlantic in the midst of a late summer hurricane and she did as he had earlier predicted, she grabbed her purse and walked out.

She drove home in a fog only partially attributable to the gin, unlocked her apartment door, and punched in the security code on the panel by the door. She bolted for the bathroom, shedding clothing as she went, and jumped into the shower and scrubbed herself raw under scalding hot water.

Afterwards, she sat huddled in a bathrobe on a vanity stool in front of a lovely vintage dressing table that had once belonged to her grandmother, and faced herself – and her demons – in the mirror.

Three years ago a man had stolen Lisa's innocence – not her virginity, but her innocent trust in the innate goodness of people in general. Lisa's attack was only one in a string of rapes committed by this predator. He was arrested, convicted on several counts of sexual assault, and was now serving hard time as a guest of the Florida Department of Corrections.

Lisa began serving her sentence, as all rape victims do, the day he raped her. The doctors told her that the scar he carved with a buck knife above her right breast would most likely never disappear, but that she could expect it to fade in time. The psychologists told her that the same held true for her emotional scars.

Lisa steered clear of romantic entanglements of any kind until six months ago, in the fall, when she found herself charmed beyond reason by a young executive in an airport in Texas. For the first time in years, the laws of attraction once again applied to Lisa, and she felt her body, as well as her mind, respond to him. And she remembered, briefly, how good things could be between men and women. This was, of course, before he turned into her worst nightmare and held her hostage aboard the red eye flight to Miami, forcing her to participate in an act of national terrorism.

But she'd won, hadn't she? She'd beat Jackson Rippner at his own game after a long and arduous struggle. She'd nearly killed him, and perhaps she had, she didn't really know for sure. She saw him wheeled away from her home in an ambulance with a gunshot wound to the chest. Charles Keefe, the man targeted by the terrorist act and the director of Homeland Security, told her personally that Jackson Rippner was no longer a threat to her. She'd understood when he explained that for security reasons, he couldn't tell her more than that. (The feds had, in fact, somehow put a squelch on the press and Rippner was never identified publicly.)

She'd believed that she had won; certainly she'd lived through the horror. And yet look what her life had become once the adrenaline subsided, the furor died down, and the world expected her to be exactly as she was before.

She waded through her daily life now armed only with a blind faith that at some point it had to get better, that at some point she could face her father again with a real smile, and not one she dredged up to ease his fears and insecurities about her mental health and physical safety. She looked forward to a day when she could sleep easily at night without waking countless times to reassure herself by touching the cold metal of the gun she kept hidden under her pillow.

She hoped that someday she could return to the Lux Atlantic, the site of the assassination attempt against Mr. Keefe and his family, without feeling overwhelmed with panic and terror; and that someday she could call her former co-worker, maybe ask her out to lunch, without feeling guilt for refusing the hand of friendship offered by this kind, caring, and spontaneously happy young woman. Lisa knew that she avoided Cynthia because she saw in the other woman far too much of her former self. Once upon a time she too, sparkled.

Lisa was, in fact, in deep mourning for her pre-crisis life. Tonight she found herself snapped abruptly out of the numbing fog of denial and for the first time she became aware that beneath the familiar dull mantle of depression lay a deep reservoir of anger.

Now she faced herself in the mirror, stripped of make-up and at the moment, of hope. But it was time, she felt – in fact, far past time – for her to look at herself with unflinching honesty.

She saw dark circles beneath tired eyes and hair that had lost its gloss. She untied the robe and pushed it away from her body and looked at bones where once there had been curves, at dry skin that used to glow with health. She looked, too, at pink scar tissue that had indeed, with time, faded from angry red.

She traced the scar languidly with her fingertips, and thought about the man, the terrorist, who had touched her there so gently only months before, and she knew that her fight was not over, that he could not be allowed to win.

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A_**/N: Sorry for the long time between updates. Life got in the way. Thank you Royalty09, emptyvoices, and Zzee for helping me find my way back!**_


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